Sunday, January 4, 2009

Well, most of the characters died in the last game we played… they were “rolled up” – using the Fantasy Character Generator Toolkit… So since pretty much everyone was dead (and my watch had stopped so I thought it was an our earlier that it really was we rolled up some new characters… and… well… they SUCKED!!!

Darrin’s new character sucked the least… it was an Elf mage… that was loyal… but yellow… oh, and he was a werewolf!?

Andrej’s character was blinded in his childhood… he also became a mage. Fair enough… When he rolled stingy master and had to get rid of one of his starting powers he ditched light and kept bolt (“it’s of no use to me” – uh yeah, could be useful for your party members whereas throwing around bolts WHEN YOU CAN”T SEE is going to be downright hazardous to them!?)

Oh, It gets better…

Then there was Lloyd’s Character. The “truly elder” half-orc bandit/mercenary… “Truly elder” is 100 on the d100 age table. Sure he got ten rolls on the professional table… but his strength and vigor would drop by two die types after he was done generating his character and could never be raised. Also, at the beginning of every game he was to draw a card from the deck, if it was a joker he would die of old age at the end of the session… Oh but that’s not all… during those 10 rolls on the professional table he fought in two wars which ended with many rolls on the “battle scars” table… one of which blinded him. Yeah, blind. Just like Andrej’s character… Oh, it gets better… he also ended up being a member of a secret society – The Broken Staff – their purpose: to destroy all arcane objects they come across….

So we got a cowardly (but loyal) elf-mage-werewolf, leading around a couple of blind guys… one’s another mage that likes to throw bolts around at things he can not see and an ancient scarred half-orc warrior sworn to destroy all arcane objects he comes across that just might die at any given moment…

Here’s another situation where the tables kind of break down… there’s no modifier for parents health on the age table – so according to the rolls Lloyd made concerning his parents – they would have both been alive and well… I made him add 50 to each roll and any result over 100 meant they were dead from old age. I made him add 40(?) for his siblings rolls. Despite that most of them (3 or 4, I believe) ended up still being alive!?

So on this first Savage Saturday of the year all made some new chracters… Here’s what they came up with…

Lloyd and Andre both went with Dwarf Warrior types, Ivan McGregor and Torte, respectively.

All are to have written backgrounds by next week or they don’t get bennies! Brijit’s background was basically rolled up, Amanda just has to come up with names for siblings and parents and whatnot. I’m interested to see what Lloyd and Andrej come up with as I insinuated that particularly detailed or interesting backgrounds might gain them bonuses to skills, attributes or possibly even edges…

I’ll be sure to add those to the blog next week!

In the meantime we played a quick little encounter on the road to Sykl, The city where the trio are headed in search of employment.

Blocking their way were four stout lads of Novsk who indicated that they (the characters) were trespassing on the land of Erik Redaxe and would have to pay The Toll… There may have been some racial slurs involved in the challenge.

Ivan decided he would have none of that and started things off by tossing his axe in their general direction… After watching it sail over their heads they shot an arrow into him. Torte pointed at the “leader” that had challenged them, in an intimidating way, and shouted “YOO, YER DEED!” and charged. So intimidated was he that he was shaken!

Torte ended up fighting two of them, Brijit charged in against one… it took Ivan a turn or two to recover from the arrow in him, he then charged in to help out the “wee one”, though in the end it was her, the minor pacifist, with no fighting skill whatsoever, that hit him and caused some 37 damage….? It worked out to 7 or 8 wounds (cut his head clean off!)

At one point the men tried to break off and run, but Ivan and Torte Chased them down. Once down Ivan went around finishing them off… (I may just give him a bonus bloodthirsty hindrance if he keeps that up!?) Tehn they collected up the weapons and loot and continued on into the city. There they spent some time trying to sell the weapons they had looted from the dead and we called it a night.

At one point during the game Ivan was explaining that a Dwarf was like “a man and a half” and thus brijit, being a Halfling, was “like…. Errrr… uh… and eighth of a dwarf…?!”

Brijit decided to point out his faulty math and countered with “well… if a dwarf is a man and a half and a Halfling is half a man shouldn’t that mean that a Halfling is a third of a dwarf…”

The cogs turned in ivans head until it hurt and he dicided it wasn’t worth trying to figure out – he knew she was less than him – a lot less than him – and that was good enough so he threatened to cut her in half if she didn’t like his math then growled menacingly and brandished his sword a moment before storming off…